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What Do You Like to Read?

Reading a newspaper outside the Palau de la Generalitat in Barcelona, Spain.Credit...Manu Fernandez/Associated Press

This article is part of the Opinion Today newsletter. You can sign up here to receive more briefings and a guide to the section daily in your inbox.

First, a request: What digital media subscriptions would you recommend to others?

I’m not interested in the most obvious answers, like The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker or The Atlantic. Tell me about publications that cover a specific subject, local publications with national relevance or anything else. I would also welcome recommendations of a couple of free publications you particularly like.

Email me at leonhardt@nytimes.com. I’ll share the results later this week.

The middle-class tax hike. Each time Congress makes major changes to its tax bill, the independent tax experts who analyze bills need to do another analysis. Yesterday, the Tax Policy Center came out with a new overview of the Senate bill, and it was brutal. You can see a summary in the chart below.

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In brief, 98 percent of households making at least $5 million (roughly the top 1/1,000th of the income distribution) receive a tax cut by the time the bill is fully implemented. Only about 26 percent of those making less than $150,000 a year (roughly the bottom 4/5ths of the distribution) get a tax cut.

The tax bill has a few decent ideas scattered in it. But it is, at root, an enormous tax cut for the very rich, financed by a combination of middle-class tax increases and deficit increases.

As Chye-Ching Huang notes, it would be very easy to write a tax bill with an entirely different emphasis.

Elsewhere. Tyler Cowen, on his blog, offers a limited defense of the Trump presidency. I don’t agree with large parts of his analysis, but it’s worth reading.

On foreign policy, Cowen argues that Trump has begun a real “pivot toward Asia” — cultivating better relations with Japan and India while pressuring China to help contain North Korean nuclear aggression — and has taken risks in the Middle East that could pay off.

On the domestic front, Cowen credits the president for cutting federal regulations. And he tentatively suggests that Trump’s attacks on American “political and social norms” could nonetheless leave them stronger than before.

German turmoil. Why did Chancellor Angela Merkel’s attempts to put together a governing coalition collapse?

Because there was not enough of a vision for what Germany would try to accomplish under the new government, writes Philipp Wittrock in Der Spiegel. Absent that vision, the parties fell into bickering over smaller issues.

“None of the parties really made a positive case,” he explains. “And that is troubling. After all, the German economy is thriving, meaning that the new government will be in the enviable position of having the financial means to develop projects and undertake reforms like never before.”

Germany may be facing a new election, only two months after its last one.

Sexual harassment, by industry. In yesterday’s newsletter, I mentioned the scourge of sexual harassment in some low-wage industries. Jocelyn Frye of the Center for American Progress has broken down federal harassment claims by the sector from which they come, in a new analysis.

The problem cuts across all sectors. The one with the most claims is “accommodation and food services.” Retail is second on Frye’s list, and manufacturing is third. Health care, including social assistance, is fourth.

Perhaps most alarmingly, Frye writes: “Nearly three-quarters of sexual harassment charges include an allegation of retaliation either upon being filed or later on in an investigation, suggesting that many victims face retribution when they come forward.”

You can join me on Twitter (@DLeonhardt) and Facebook. I am also writing a daily email newsletter and invite you to subscribe.

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